Week 6, Video 9: Some Other Obstacles To Mindfulness, Including Logistical Ones

What are the determinants of a happy and fulfilling life?
This is surely one of life’s biggest questions, and a question that has interested many of our ancestors. Buddha famously gave up his kingdom in search of happiness. Several Greek philosophers (from Aristotle to Epicurus and Plato to Socrates) had their own views on what it takes to be happy. And of course, we all have our own theories about happiness too.
How valid are our theories?
Until recently, if you wished for an answer to this question, you would've been forced to base it on discussions with spiritual leaders. Or, if you were lucky, you could've based it on late-night (and perhaps intoxicant-fueled) conversations with friends and family. Happily, all that has changed now. Over the past decade-and-a-half, scientists have gotten into the act big time. We now have a pretty good idea of what it takes to lead a happy and fulfilling life.
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Although not mandatory, reading Prof. Raj's forthcoming book, titled If you're so smart, why aren't you happy? can help you review and assimilate the material covered in this book at your leisure.
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The course will feature guest appearances by several well-known thought leaders, including:
- Dan Ariely (author of Predictably Irrational and, soon to be released, Irrationally Yours),
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By taking this course, you will discover the answers to questions such as:
- Why aren’t the smart-and-the-successful as happy as they could—or should—be
- What are the “7 Deadly Happiness Sins” that even the smart and the successful commit?, and
- What are the “7 Habits of the Highly Happy” and how can you implement them in your life?
By the end of the course, I expect students who have been diligent with the lectures and exercises to not just gain a deeper understanding of the science of happiness, but to also be significantly happier.

教学方

Dr. Rajagopal Raghunathan

脚本

Ni hao, welcome back my friend. The last two sessions have been discussing the various obstacles that prevent us from being open to mindfulness practice. I started with some motivational obstacles, which have to do with negative misconceptions about mindfulness, such as it's too woo-woo, or that it will make me soft and weak. As we saw these types of negative beliefs are not valid. We also saw how many of us impose various cognitive obstacles to start a mindfulness practice, including believing that it has to do with not having any thoughts, or first wanting to understand what it is intellectually before trying it, or believing that it's going to take months or even years to see any benefits. Again, as we saw, these are invalid objections to mindfulness. It turns out that mindfulness is not about having no thoughts, rather, it's about changing our relationship with thoughts. It's also not something that you can comprehend with your mind. So, it's best to dive in first, and then see what it's all about. And finally, it's not the case that you will only start realizing the benefits if you have been doing it intensely for a long time. As we saw in the previous video, even a mere five minutes a day can yield results in five weeks. Now that we have cleared all those motivational and cognitive obstacles, let me get to a third set of obstacles, including some logistical ones. Logistical obstacles may, in fact, be the ones that are dogging you the most. Logistical obstacles have to do with finding the time and space and energy to make mindfulness a regular practice. Many of us lead such frenetic lives, that we don't find enough time to have a relaxed lunch or play with our kids. So fitting in a 20 or even a 12 minute mindfulness session every day may be asking for too much. I posed this problem to Professor Richard Davidson when I talked to him recently, and asked him for his advice. Here's what he said, listen. >> Secondly, I would start with really short periods of practice. Really short, [COUGH] on the order of one or two minutes. And so do it in a very relaxed way, where you can realistically accomplish what you set out for. If you, you know, decide you're gonna practice for a half an hour and you spend most of that time fidgeting, it's not really gonna be very helpful. So doing it in really short periods to start, I think can really be important, and is a key to more success. >> So as you just heard Professor Davidson say, the key is to start with very, very short sessions, in the order of one or two minutes a day. Surely, everyone can spare one or two minutes. And it's not just that everyone can spare one or two minutes. There's something else that Professor Davidson said about these really short sessions that's very key. It's that you won't be frustrated with the sessions, and therefore will be less likely to give it up. If you decide to sit for 30, or even 20 minutes, and end up fidgeting most of the time, there's a very good chance that you'll walk away without experiencing even a glimpse into any of the positive effects that we talked about earlier. Which may make you feel frustrated, and therefore make you give it up. By contrast, if you spend only a couple of minutes each day, there's very little chance of being defeated by frustration. Talking of frustration, another reason for frustration with mindfulness is setting high expectations. In some ways, getting to know all of those benefits of mindfulness is actually a curse. Because that knowledge can make us compare what we are experiencing with what we can expect to experience. In some domains, for example achieving high sales targets, comparing where you are with where you want to be can be a good thing. But as we saw in week one, in some other domains like happiness or sleep, it's not a good thing to compare where you are with where you want to be. It hurts your chances of achieving your goal. And mindfulness, if anything, is even more like that. The more you constantly monitor and compare where you are with where you wanna be, the less you will get. The good news about getting to know the benefits of mindfulness, is that it can motivate you to get started. The bad news is that it sets high expectations which can come in the way of being mindful, which can in turn lead to frustration at best. Or to totally giving up the practice all together because you end up concluding, what's the big deal about it, at worst. I found out that there are three things that help me overcome the tendency to set high expectations before I sit for a mindfulness session. First, I tell myself explicitly that no mindfulness session is like any other. So I tell myself that my only aim is to see how reality is going to turn out to be this time, for the next 10 or 15 minutes, or for however long you plan to sit. I tell myself that I'm going to accept whatever happens completely and unconditionally, even if what happens is that I never manage to step out of the gate of my mind. The second thing I do is to set the intention of being as dedicated to the goal of being a fly on the wall as I can. I tell myself that that's the only goal I'm gonna have for this mindfulness session. That is, I tell myself that I'm not gonna let any of the other goals, like the goal of feeling calm or of noticing subtle things come in the way of focusing on the goal of being a fly on the wall. And finally, I tell myself that, in the instance that I do end up not being able to adhere to this goal of being a fly on the wall, and of course, I fail multiple times every session. I tell myself that I'm going to be both self-compassionate, and use the experience as an opportunity to practice the sixth habit of the highly happy, the dispassionate pursuit of passion. As you may remember, the dispassionate pursuit of passion involves seeking a particular outcome, in this case of being a fly on the wall, and pursuing it to the best of one's ability. But then fully accepting whatever outcome unfolds without wallowing in negativity about it. That is regardless of what happens in any particular moment. For example, I may suddenly become aware, while I'm, you know, trying to be mindful, that I've been trying to figure out the name of the song that's been playing in the back of my head. I'm going to get back to being a fly on the wall in this moment, and the next moment, and the moment after that, and so on. If I find that I happened to have judged myself negatively for not being able to stick to my goal of being a fly on the wall, that's fine too. I try not to judge the fact that I have judged myself. Same thing for positive judgments too. If I find that I was able to be a fly on the wall for seven seconds, and realized that I just congratulated myself for it, I try to move on from that positive judgement too, and so on. Chade-Meng, the author of Search Inside Yourself, compares paying attention, which is of course critical to mindfulness, to riding a bicycle. Here, let me read out that passage where he makes this reference. I found this metaphor by the way to be very useful, and I think you will too. The way you keep a bicycle balanced is with a lot of micro-recoveries. When the bike tilts a little to the left, you recover by adjusting to the right. When it tilts a little to the right, you adjust it slightly to the left. By performing micro-recoveries quickly and often, you create the effect of continuous upright balance. It's the same with attention. The idea is that with practice, just like you're able to recover balance through micro-adjustments when you're bicycling, you will be able to achieve a similar ability to bring back your attention to focusing on the present moment with practice. So to summarize I tell myself the following three things before I start a mindfulness session. Each session is new, and so don't have any expectations, which includes not comparing this session with any of the previous ones. I'm going to try and do my best to be a fly on the wall, and that's the only goal that I'm gonna have. And finally, when I find that I've deviated from this goal, I use a combination of self-compassion and dispassionate pursuit of passion to, of course, correct. These three things help me have the right attitude before and during the mindfulness session. Once the session is over, I tell myself one more thing to motivate myself for the next session. I tell myself that there is no such thing as a bad mindfulness session. This is just not wishful thinking. Several studies have shown that what's most important in mindfulness practice is regularity. So as long as you have tried sincerely to be a fly on the wall, you will have a taken at least a small step towards becoming better at being mindful in any situation. We heard Professor Shapiro allude to this point in a talk. And now, let me play you a clip from the interview that I had with Professor Richard Davidson to end this video. As you will hear, he too refers indirectly to the idea that so long as you keep at it, you'll eventually see the results. He'll begin by saying, as you begin to do that. By that, he means begin to do the mindfulness practice. Listen. >> As you begin to do that, you cultivate a certain patience because it takes awhile. It's like changing course of a river that's been flowing in the same direction for decades. It's gonna take time, and we need to have patience with this. >> So basically, what Professor Davidson is saying is that if we have patience and keep practicing mindfulness, we'll see the results. Okay, so to summarize the content of this video and the last two videos really quickly, we discussed several reasons that keep us from checking out mindfulness and from sustaining the practice. Hopefully, busting some of these myths, for example, that it's woo-woo, or that it'll make us soft, also getting some clarity on what it is and what it's not. Example, realizing that it's not about having no thoughts. Help you become more open to trying it, just in case you weren't before. Also, I hope that the discussion in this video on how to overcome some of the logistical problems with mindfulness have given you some good ideas on how to sustain the practice. That said, I realize that I have barely scratched the surface of the topic of the obstacles that keep us from practicing mindfulness. Some of you may feel that you don't have a space to practice mindfulness, or you don't have a convenient time of the day to practice it. To these types of objections I say, where there is a will, there is a way. I recommend reading The War of Art by Steven Pressfield, who wrote the screenplay for one of my all time favorite movies, The Legend of Bagger Vance, for overcoming what he calls eternal resistance. Actually, let me quickly play you a short clip from one of his videos to let you get a glimpse into what he is saying in the book. Listen. >> The demon, in this case, the dragon that we have to slay, is internally based. It's internal self-sabotage. What I call Resistance with a capital R. And the question then becomes, well how do you overcome it? Once you identify the voices that you hear in your head that are really not you, they're really this negative force that's out there, that's resisting you. For as an example, if you ever try to meditate and you try to quiet your mind, you find just these crazy things go through your head one after the other. And if you identify with them and you say that's me, then you're in trouble. But if you recognize them as just sort of alien, you know, visitations. You just let them pass through and keep working. So okay, how do you overcome resistance? For me, the policy that I use, or the phrase that I use, is turning pro. Which is a kind of a different attitude from being an amateur, to being a professional. Now an amateur, when an amateur hits a sticking point, like if you're gonna play basketball on your ankle hurts, you'll just retire to the bench and say, hey, it hurts. But a pro, like Kobe Bryant, or somebody like that, learns to play hurt. And a pro learns to do all the things that we do on our regular jobs, but apply it to our love, the love of our life, our work. A pro shows up every morning no matter what. A pro stays on the job all through the day. A pro doesn't over-identify with the work, so if there's a failure it knocks them out of the batter's box. The pro doesn't take failure personally, or success personally. A pro is patient, a pro endures adversity, a pro plays hurt. All of these, this kind of attitude of a professional, helps you attain that sort of lunch pail, hard hat, you know, attitude. That's not precious, not prima donna, not a diva, but a hard working, hit them every day, go for it, infantry attack mode. And that for me, is how you get something done from A to Z. >> So, as you just heard, it's a matter of turning into a mindfulness pro. Which means making mindfulness such a priority, that you figure out a way to get to practice it at least a couple of minutes each day, no matter what. And once you make that a nonnegotiable goal, everything else will follow. All right, before saying goodbye to you for now, in the next video where we are going to do the 6th happiness exercise, let me just leave you with a short quote from Mahatma Gandhi that you might find useful, particularly if you've been putting away mindfulness because of lack of time. [MUSIC]